I’m asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application.
I’m looking for something
- in the Fediverse
- with technology that supports discussions
- where users know the Fediverse beyond whatever software that particular place is running on
- where users know something about how and why to make Fediverse posts accessible for e.g. blind users
- where users take this topic seriously instead of seeing it as a gimmick
- where it’s likely enough for someone to reply to posts
Mastodon takes accessibility very seriously. But Mastodon users never look beyond Mastodon. Every other Mastodon user doesn’t even know that the Fediverse is more than only Mastodon. Most of those who do have no idea what the rest of the Fediverse is like, including what it can do that Mastodon can’t, and what it can’t do that Mastodon can. Many Mastodon users even reject the Fediverse outside Mastodon, and be it because it “refuses” to fully adopt Mastodon’s culture and throw its own cultures overboard. This would include using features that Mastodon doesn’t have. You’re easily being muted or blocked upon first strike if you dare to post more than 500 characters at once.
I myself am mostly on Hubzilla. Not only is Hubzilla vastly more powerful than Mastodon, it is also vastly different, and being older than Mastodon as well, it had grown its own culture before Mastodon came along. Still, three out of four Mastodon users have never even heard of the existence of Hubzilla, and many who do are likely to think it’s basically Mastodon with a higher character count, extra stuff glued on and a clunky UI.
If you try to discuss Fediverse accessibility on Mastodon, you end up only discussing Mastodon accessibility with exactly zero regards, understanding or interest for what the rest of the Fediverse is like.
Besides, Mastodon has no good support for conversations and no real concept of threads. It is impossible to follow a discussion thread or to even only know that there have been new replies without having been mentioned in these replies. Thus, any attempt at discussing something on Mastodon is futile.
Hubzilla itself is great for discussions. It even has had groups/forums as a feature from the very beginning. In practice, however, it has precious few forums. The same applies to (streams) even more.
Discussing Fediverse accessibility is completely futile on both. They don’t “do accessibility”. To their users, alt-text is some fad that was invented on Mastodon, and Hubzilla and (streams) don’t do Mastodon crap, full stop. In fact, their users hate Mastodon with a passion for deliberately, intentionally being so limited and trying to push its own limitations, its proprietary, non-standard solutions and its culture upon the rest of the Fediverse. At the same time, they don’t really know that much about Mastodon, and they aren’t interested in it.
Most of this applies to Friendica as well, but Hubzilla and (streams) users sometimes go as far as disabling ActivityPub altogether to keep Mastodon and the other ActivityPub-based microblogging projects out, and they don’t care if Friendica ends up collateral damage. They hate the non-nomadic majority of the Fediverse that much.
If you try to discuss Fediverse accessibility on Hubzilla, nobody would know what you’re even talking about, and nobody would want to know because they take it for another stupid Mastodon fad. They probably don’t even understand why I accept connection requests from Mastodon in the first place.
Here on Lemmy, I’ve seen a number of dedicated accessibility communities. But they seem to be only about accessibility on the greater Web and in real life and not a bit about accessibility in the Fediverse specifically. I’m not even sure if Lemmy itself “does accessibility” in any way. And I’m not sure how aware Lemmy is of the Fediverse beyond Lemmy, /kbin and Mastodon.
Besides, these communities aren’t much more than the admin posting stuff and nobody ever replying. So I guess trying to actually discuss something there is completely useless. If I post a question, I’ll probably never get a reply.
The reason why I’m asking here first is because this community is actually active enough for people to reply to posts. But I’m not sure if it’s good for discussing super-specific details about making non-Threadiverse Fediverse posts accessible.
I wasn’t talking about the dev side/Fediverse frontend development.
I was talking about the end user side, about the requirements to make Fediverse posts accessible, especially image descriptions.
Thing is, on Mastodon, it’s pretty much mandatory to give a useful description for every last image you post, If your posts reach Mastodon, your images better be described sufficiently. But everyone’s just got “the Mastodon way” stuck in their heads which is built around only having 500 characters in posts, and nobody can imagine there being images that are much different from Mastodon/Twitter screenshots nor cat photographs.
And everywhere that isn’t Mastodon, nobody has even heard of alt-text or image descriptions, or if they have, they think it’s another stupid Mastodon fad.
That’s what I have mostly got on my mind.
Alright. I didn’t get that. But I think my recommendation still holds true. As you found out already, it’s not happening unless the UI incentivises the users to do so. I think most users don’t care about accessibility or aren’t educated on the subject. It’s just not something within their lives/perspective. So I think if you want to solve that issue, it has to happen in the UI and the software developers have to nudge people to do it.
If you want to talk to a few users, I think this place is as good as any.
On Mastodon, this happens much more quickly than you might imagine.
Post an image without alt-text, especially on a big, general-purpose, notorious newbie instance, and there’ll likely be someone who asks you to add an alt-text to your image.
Unless you keep yourself inside a small special interest bubble with no contact to the outside Fediverse, you will be educated on the subject, whether you want or not.
And Mastodon users don’t care if whoever they educate about alt-text and image descriptions is on Mastodon or elsewhere because they can’t see where someone is, at least not at first glance.
Would you happen to know why that is? Are there enough users using screenreaders or something so that a missing alt-text catches their attention? Or are these the nerds who use like a Linux command line client and that’s why they rely on proper text descriptions?
Unlike other places, Mastodon is not “everyone for themselves” and “hey, let’s shitpost about minorities for the lulz”. While Lemmy is trying to be Reddit 2: Electric Boogaloo, Mastodon is trying to be nega-Twitter. Except for Gargron and the other devs who are trying to make Mastodon Twitter with sprinkles.
The Mastodon community is trying hard to make Mastodon feel nice and comfortable and welcoming for everyone, just like Mastodon felt nice and comfortable and welcoming to them after they had freshly arrived from that rampantly ultra-fascist hellhole that’s called 𝕏 now. They’re trying hard, and I mean hard, not to be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist.
This includes lots of things that are completely unthinkable on Reddit because they are technically impossible. Alt-text on images, for example, for which Mastodon offers a whopping 1,500 characters per image. Content warnings for sensitive posts in what’s actually the summary field. Hiding sensitive images which is actually something non-standard and semi-proprietary by Mastodon that hardly anything else out there supports.
Many instances actually make alt-text on images and content warnings for specific topics mandatory in their instance rules. Which topics require CWs partly differ from instance to instance; instances with a focus on neurodivergence/autism, for example, require a CW for eye contact in addition to the usual. Instances only enforce these rules on local users and local posts and not on what’s happening in the federated timeline, but they do have these rules, and they enforce them to the point of permanently banning users.
At the same time, however, these things have become part of Mastodon’s culture. You simply do that stuff, lest you’re at least shunned by “the Mastodon community”. At least. Or you’re being lectured about having to add actually useful alt-text to images and content warnings to sensitive posts. Or you’re muted or blocked outright.
If an image has alt-text, the Web interface shows a little rectangle with “ALT” in it in one corner. Mobile apps tend to do the same. You immediately see upon first glance whether an image has alt-text or not.
Beware if someone catches your post with an image without that “ALT” marker.
Mastodon’s goal, not defined by the devs but by the end users, is for 100% of all images that appear on Mastodon to have alt-text. There are daily stats on which Mastodon instance has how high a percentage of image posts with alt-text. I think mastodon.social, the notorious newbie and “I keep using Mastodon like Twitter” instance, is somewhere between 10% or 20% or so. By Lemmy standards, this may seem mind-boggling high, but by Mastodon standards, it’s embarrassingly low. Some instances reach 80%, and by Mastodon standards, this means there are still 20% image posts that aren’t accessible.
Oh, and there being an “ALT” marker is not enough. If there is an “ALT” marker, people will go check the alt-text. If it doesn’t actually sufficiently describe the image, or if the image is predominantly text, and the alt-text doesn’t contain a full, verbatim transcript, that’s just as bad as there not being any alt-text, and it’s treated just like there was no alt-text.
On Mastodon, alt-text is absolutely. Serious. Muthafscking. Business. Full stop. To the point that you may have mods at your throat if you don’t provide it.
On a side-note, most Mastodon users can’t tell whether a post came from Mastodon or not. They treat posts in their timelines that came from Akkoma or Misskey or Iceshrimp or Friendica or Hubzilla or whatever just like native Mastodon posts. Except for sometimes at least being highly annoyed if a post goes over 500 characters, that is. But they aren’t like, “Okay, you’re excused for not providing alt-text because you’re on Misskey, and Misskey doesn’t have an alt-text culture,” or like, “Okay, you’re excused for not providing alt-text because you’re on Friendica, and you have to program alt-text into your posts on Friendica, and even that is buggy.”
If your post appears on Mastodon, it’d better integrate with Mastodon’s culture or else. Also, Mastodon users don’t know anything about anything outside Mastodon, neither cultural differences nor technological differences.
My estimation is rather that 70% of all Mastodon users are on iPhones, and 25% are on Android phones, always with dedicated Mastodon apps. Hardly anyone seems to use Mastodon on a computer.
There are actually many blind or visually-impaired Mastodon users. It seems to naturally attract them, just like 𝕏 repels them.
However, there are also people with bad Internet connections for whom images often don’t load at all. Remember that everyone’s on phones, and they don’t have 4G or 5G everywhere.
And there are even people with no disabilities who say that alt-text helps them understand what an image shows. I think that should be the task of explanations in the post because not everyone can access alt-text, but that’ll never be engrained in Mastodon’s culture because you can only explain so much in 500 characters minus hashtags, minus mentions, minus the content warning and minus the actual toot.
Hmmh. I’ve advocated for more nuanced content warnings here on Lemmy. Didn’t resonate well with neither the community nor the developers. I dropped the topic. I’m waiting for PieFed to come along and bring me an alternative backend for the Threadiverse.
Thanks for the summary. I don’t really use Mastodon so I wouldn’t know. But I’m all for alt-text to images. I set them on every website I’m involved with…
I’m not sure about Lemmy. I use this more for textual conversation. But now that I’ve learned how to do it in Markdown, I’ll add the description to the 5 (or so) pictures I post every year.
I don’t think other places on the Fediverse have a distinct culture or vision. Like Mastodon has. For example Lemmy is quite random. And still dominated by the lots of ex-Reddit-users who migrated here. And we often can not agree on where we’d like to go. And I perceive a split/separation between the developers and the users. There isn’t really a conversation going on. Neither between users and developers, nor between the users themselves. So my prediction is: As of now we’re not going anywhere. Lemmy is going to stay relatively random and will also stay about the same size, until someone steps in and changes this place.
Do you have a vision? Is there a reason why you started this conversation? Something you’d like us to do?
(I mean you could post your comprehensive perspective in a post/thread here, and then also toot the link to Mastodon, or boost it or whatever that’s called. I think this is just a meta discussion and it’s probably not going anywhere… You got a bit of attention here, but ultimately we’re still not discussing the actual topic. At least I didn’t yet understand if you have a need or a proposal to make.)
Yes.
When I post images on Hubzilla, I always describe them. I have connections not only within Hubzilla, but mostly on Mastodon and also elsewhere (Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish etc. etc., all over the place).
The problem I have is three-fold: One, my images are extreme edge-cases topic-wise. They’re about 3-D virtual worlds. Very obscure 3-D virtual worlds. As in, maybe one out of 200,000 Fediverse users even knows the underlying system, and I’m not even talking about the specific place where I’ve taken an image. This makes very extensive image descriptions necessary because I can’t suppose that people already know what whatever is in the images looks like. And it makes very extensive explanations within the image descriptions necessary so that people get the images in the first place.
I can’t take anything about my pictures for common knowledge. I need over 1,000 characters alone to explain where an image is from.
Two, I’m not bound to the same limitations as your average Fediverse user when it comes to describing the image. I don’t only look at the image when I’m describing it. I look at the real deal in-world when I’m describing it. This gives me an almost infinite zoom factor. I can see things in-world that are so tiny in the image that they’re invisible. I can describe and actually have described in the past images within my image. And nearly on the same level as the image that I was actually describing.
Three, I’m not bound to the same limitations as your average Mastodon user when it comes to posting an image description. I am bound to the 1,500-character alt-text limit because Mastodon truncates longer alt-text and throws the excess characters away. But I do not have a 500-character limit. I don’t have any character limit at all. I can post 80,000 characters, and Mastodon will show these 80,000 characters, all of them, and so will other Fediverse projects.
So I can put full, detailed image descriptions of nearly any length into the post text body. This is completely unimaginable on Mastodon. And that’s why I can’t discuss these things with Mastodon users: They can’t even imagine what I’m doing.
Anyhow, this leads me into situations which are just as completely unimaginable for Mastodon users, which I therefore can’t discuss with people who only know Mastodon. And this raises questions for me which people who only know Mastodon can’t answer because they can’t even imagine why I’d ask something like that, because the very concept is alien to them.
This started early on in last summer when I started to seriously describe my images after I had found out that many Mastodon users like highly detailed image descriptions. My first attempt at writing one ended with over 13,000 characters of image description, and I couldn’t possibly reduce them without losing content. So I wanted to know where the best place to put such a long image description would be. I didn’t even get an answer. So I had to figure out from other posts and their replies that it’s always best to keep image descriptions and explanations as close to the image as possible, i.e. in the same post. I’m still not sure if that’s what Mastodon users, especially disabled users, would prefer in my case.
Then more and more questions came up.
Do I have to describe images in images? Images in images in images?
For example, the rule is that if there’s text within the borders of the image, it must be transcribed. However, this rule does not define edge-cases because it doesn’t take edge-cases into consideration. What about text that’s so small in the image that it’s visible, but illegible (3 pixels high)? Or text that’s so small in the image that it’s invisible (less than a pixel high)? Or text that’s partly obscured in the image (poster-sized sign with a tree trunk in front of it)? Must I, may I or mustn’t I transcribe it? Again, let’s suppose that I can read it in-world with no problems.
Or from which point on is it required to warn about eye contact? (I actually got an answer to this from someone who knows. If an eye can be made out in an image, then an eye contact warning is necessary. I was told that, yes, there are autistic persons who are triggered by an eye that’s 1/100th of a pixel high and 1/100 of a pixel wide.)
All stuff that you never think about when all you ever post are fairly simple real-life photographs.
I do not want to discuss these topics in this thread! If anything, my plan is to start separate threads for each of these.
My goal is simply to find a place where I can discuss them with people who know enough to be able to give me sensible answers that I can work with.
If you think this Lemmy community is such a place, then I’ll stay and ask away, and then and only then I’d like to see competent answers to my questions.
But if you think that nobody here will be able to understand what I want because what I’m asking is just too alien for everyone here, then it doesn’t make sense to try and ask.
Oh well. That’s a bit more complicated than I thought.
First of all, it might be true that people here won’t understand you. And I’m not sure if Lemmy is the right choice for you anyways. The OpenSim community doesn’t seem very active. And since you’re talking about 13.000 character descriptions… That will also not fly on Lemmy. I think we have a 10k character limit for posts and comments here. You’d exceed that here, too.
And then Mastodon is a microblogging platform. Originally intended for short messages. I know some people use it for a different purpose. And some people go there because of the short and concise messages. So I’m not really sure if that’s your place either. It might be you using the wrong tool for your task, since it’s intended for a different purpose and you’d need a different tool.
I mean I don’t know where the community of 3D worlds mingle… Maybe you can take some inspiration from them if you’re not the only one.
But it could very well the case that the alt-text and character limits of the platforms aren’t the issue here. But you choosing platforms that are not suited for your task. I’d say if your texts regularly exceed a few thousand characters, you don’t want a microblogging platform, but a macro-blogging (or just blogging) platform. There are some that are meant for long texts. And you can even use Wordpress or something like that, do your own blog and install an ActivityPub plugin if you want a connection to the Fediverse. I mean in the old times, people used more than social media and shared their thoughts in forums or on a personal blog, or a website dedicated to a topic. That comes with almost no restrictions.
Ultimately, I haven’t seen your posts/toots. And I don’t really know the alt-text culture on Mastodon. Maybe my advice isn’t that good.
Another thing: Is it really necessary to write that super detailed description in an alt-text? As far as I’ve learned about alt-text in webdesign, that is originally intended to give a concise description of the image in the context regarding the rest of the text. It is meant to be short and concise, like a tweet. It’s read by screenreaders and displayed if the image didn’t load. It’d be more something like: “a medieval market squares with dozens of booths, bustling with player activity.” But you won’t describe what’s sold in the market stand at the bottom right, or the portal on the left, unless it’s important in the context of the rest of your post. If you want to do a comprehensive analysis or a discussion like in art class, I’d say that goes into the main body text, and not into the alt-text. I’d consider that “abuse” of the alt tag. And it might even do a disservice to people who need accessibility, who now get a completely different experience than everybody else. I’d put that detailed description into the normal text. Maybe make it a spoiler so it collapses.
In the end I’m not part of that community, and everything depends on what you’re trying to achieve. But that’d be my perspective: A blog would be better suited. And long descriptions go into the body text, not the alt-text. And if you choose to write longer blog posts, you can still link them on Lemmy, or post a link to it on Mastodon.
Then allow me to make it less complicated. Or even more complicated.
It has never been my plan to post images with such massive descriptions on Lemmy. Lemmy doesn’t require image descriptions. It doesn’t require alt-text either. It doesn’t even officially support alt-text. Lemmy doesn’t live and enforce a culture of accessibility.
Most importantly, though: The OpenSim community has no subscribers on general-purpose Mastodon instances. What’s posted there will most likely never appear in the federated timeline of e.g. mastodon.social where people could get all riled up about the lack of alt-text and image description.
Besides, the 13,000-character image description is outdated already. My image descriptions have grown since then. 25,000 characters, 40,000 characters, and yesterday, I’ve posted a 60,000-character description for an image that also got an alt-text precisely at Mastodon’s limit of 1,500 characters.
**I don’t intend to post my images on Mastodon either.
I intend to keep posting them on Hubzilla (official website).**
Hubzilla has got nothing to do with Mastodon. It was first released in 2015, ten months before Mastodon. It was renamed and repurposed from the Red Matrix from 2012 which is a fork of Friendica from 2010.
Hubzilla is vastly different from Mastodon in just about everything. Like its predecessors, it has never had a character limit, and it has always had the full set of features of text formatting and post design as any full-blown long-form blogging platform out there. In fact, maybe even more than that.
Hubzilla is not a microblogging project. It can work as one, but it can seamlessly transition between microblogging and fully featured long-form blogging and everything in-between. Hubzilla is the Swiss army knife of the Fediverse, renamed from a fork of a Facebook alternative that was created also with blogging in mind.
So I want to post my images on Hubzilla.
What does this have to do with Mastodon then?
It has to do with Mastodon that I’ve got lots of Mastodon connections. All my OpenSim connections except for one are on Mastodon, and I think all of these are on one and the same OpenSim-themed instance. But on top of that, I’ve got hundreds of Mastodon connections all over the place, including mastodon.social and other big general-purpose instances.
And all those non-OpenSim Mastodon connections came to exist because they followed me. It was not my decision to follow them. They followed me because they expected me to explain the Fediverse beyond Mastodon to them because I had recently done so. Or they followed me because they had freshly arrived from Twitter, and they desperately needed Mastodon to feel like Twitter, including lots of uninteresting background noise in their personal timeline, so they followed everyone and everything they came across in the federated timeline.
So my image posts on Hubzilla will automatically federate to Mastodon and appear in people’s Mastodon timelines. And it isn’t my decision.
Sure, on Hubzilla, I have the power to limit precisely who can see my posts by only sending them to specific connections. But I want the Fediverse world out there to see the marvels of OpenSim, to learn that free, decentralised 3-D virtual worlds have been reality since 2007, that “the metaverse” is anything but dead and not invented by Zuckerberg. I don’t want to remain stuck in an echo chamber.
Oh, and by the way: Mastodon can receive posts up to a maximum length of 100,000 characters by default. Also, Mastodon does not truncate long posts. It only truncates alt-text that exceeds 1,500 characters. But it leaves posts up to 100,000 characters as intact as any other post and probably simply rejects longer posts.
My tool of choice is Hubzilla. And there’s hardly anything better in the Fediverse for what I do than Hubzilla.
They’re only indirectly. With that, I mean that Mastodon’s default limit of 500 characters is deeply engrained in Mastodon’s culture, and Mastodon’s culture is influenced by this limitation. For example, 500 characters make image descriptions in the post impossible. Thus, they’re not part of Mastodon’s culture. Thus, the very concept, the very idea is completely unimaginable to Mastodon users. Because as per Mastodon’s unwritten rules, “alt-text” and “image description” are mutually synonymous. They mean the exact same thing. Everything that describes the image goes into the alt-text, and that’s the way it is, full stop.
Hubzilla is meant for long texts. It has always been.
And Hubzilla is every bit as capable of long-form blogging as WordPress.
There’s no need to have one separate tool for each task if you already have one tool that can cover all these tasks. And Hubzilla can.
Here’s my most recent image post from yesterday.
60,000+ characters of full image description, my longest one so far. Plus precisely 1,500 characters of alt-text. And I actually had to limit myself in comparison to earlier posts. No detailed descriptions of images within the image. No transcripts of text on images within the image. No mentioning in the alt-text where exactly to find the full description.
And I’m trying to explain it to you.
Maybe it’s easier to experience first-hand, to see it with your own very eyes. Go through what appears on mastodon.social under certain hashtags and do so regularly for a few weeks or months:
Also, check the posts from @alttexthalloffame.
In the case of the image I’ve posted yesterday, and seeing as that post went out to general-purpose Mastodon instances and into the realm of Mastodon culture, definitely yes.
Oh, and in case you haven’t understood that yet because it’s so out-of-whack: I describe my images twice. One, a short description with no explanations in alt-text. Two, a full, detailed description with all necessary explanations in the post text body itself. The latter has to be even more detailed. And here’s my explanation why.
Alt-text rules for webdesign are halfway useless in social media.
And alt-text rules for webdesign, as well as alt-text rules for corporate American social media silos, are even more useless on Mastodon. Mastodon’s alt-text culture has nothing to do with that.
Again, I already do that with the full description.
But Mastodon insists, insists, insists in an actually descriptive image description in alt-text, no matter what. For one, out of principle. Besides, they can’t imagine there being an image description in the post text (which I hide behind a summary/content warning that they have to click to open first) because this is technically impossible on Mastodon.
So I have to describe the same image once more, this time in the alt-text, in addition to the full description in the post.
I can do that on Hubzilla. But Mastodon doesn’t support spoiler tags.
Most frontends for Mastodon collapse longer posts, the official Web interface as well as probably all third-party mobile apps, only the official mobile app doesn’t.
Content warnings which are the same as summaries on StatusNet/GNU social/Friendica/Hubzilla collapse posts, too, or rather hide them. I always give one of these when I post over 500 characters, so my image posts do collapse for just about everyone.
And once again, that’s what I already do. In addition to the shorter description in the alt-text.